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Baidu will battle Google for hearts and minds

The digital lives of people outside the West are up for grabs and a Chinese dragon will fight Silicon Valley giants to get to them first

Made in China

(Image: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

THERE is a gold rush going on at the digital frontier. As the economies of the likes of Brazil and India grow, so does the demand for web services of the kind that Westerners have come to take for granted&colon; fast, reliable and ubiquitous.

We’ve heard a lot about established tech giants’ plans to deliver internet to the masses. Facebook wants to use drones; Google is opting for high-flying balloons. Others are hard at work on websites specially designed for non-Western cultures. Now there is a new player in the game, and it may change the rules.

Baidu, a search engine based in Beijing, has lofty ambitions. Having conquered China, it is expanding into other growing digital markets, including Brazil, Egypt and Thailand. It is also busily setting up labs to perform the kind of cutting-edge research at which Google excels (see “The new Google? Baidu’s big plans to bust out of China“). More and more, it seems, Baidu is not satisfied with simply emulating US companies at home&colon; it wants to become the developing world’s Google.

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There is every reason to believe it can succeed. Baidu was itself forged in a rapidly developing country. China’s digital market is vast, with more than 600 million internet users, but it also varies widely in digital literacy and infrastructure, from savvy consumers in the cities of the east to uneducated peasants in the rural west. Baidu has learned to tune itself to China’s varying needs. That experience may allow it to offer services that US companies don’t understand.

Baidu’s prospects in the West are less rosy. The company is toxically associated with China’s censorship policies, and the English-speaking part of the web is already largely spoken for.

But as Baidu enters territories that US web giants covet, we can expect some interesting culture clashes. “Made in China” versus “made in Silicon Valley” is about more than business competition. It will influence how a whole generation of people outside the West understand the world and their place in it.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Digital hearts and minds”